Two Years After the BP Spill, Gulf Oysters Are Full Of Heavy Metals | Mother Jones

On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, evidence of the spill's ongoing impacts on Gulf people and ecosystems continues to mount. As if eyeless shrimp, toxic beaches, and dead dolphins weren't bad enough, a new study suggests that Gulf oysters are also in trouble.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences says that oysters in the Gulf contain higher concentrations of the heavy metals found in crude oil now than they did before the spill. Using a method known—awesomely—as "laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry," the scientists vaporized oyster shells and superheated them, causing different elements to radiate light at specific, known frequencies so they could be identified. They measured higher concentrations of vanadium, cobalt, and chromium—three heavy metals present in oil—in the oysters sampled after the spill. Even more worrisome, the team found that 89 percent of post-spill specime...

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